Abstract
In the past, little attention has been paid to the socio-psychological dimension of the phenomenon of severe poverty in Africa. Despite the institutional nature of the global economic order, including policies of the European Union, the World Trade Organisation, and the International Monetary Fund, it is people who design, support, and maintain this system, and individual constructions of the world and structural inequalities reinforce one another. This also finds its expression in different ways in, e.g., peoples social representations of severe poverty in Europes former colonies (Park, 2008, 2011). This article investigates, how we members of the European middle class construct ourselves as ethical beings in the context of African poverty: What is the link between our social representations, identity construction and (in)action with regard to severe poverty in Africa? What are the discursive mechanisms we apply in the construction of an ethical self and what is the notion of the African Other? In a nutshell: What do our social represenations make us do
Highlights
The clandestine power of dominant discourses is to create an invisible normality
This article investigates, how we, members of the European middle class, construct ourselves as ethical beings in the context of African poverty: What is the link between our social representations, identity construction andaction with regard to severe poverty in Africa? What are the discursive mechanisms we apply in the construction of an ethical self and what is the notion of the „African Other‟? In a nutshell: What do our social represenations make us do?
Regardless of whether one considers severe poverty as a phenomenon caused by rich countries and chooses the approach of justice and redistribution, or whether one prefers to join the charity discourse and chooses the approach of aid and help, one question remains: How do we[1], people living in Europe, construct ourselves as ethical beings in the context of global/African poverty? What is the link between our social representations, identity construction andaction with regard to severe poverty
Summary
Part of the contemporary European normality is a global institutional order under which at least 46% of humankind live below the poverty line as defined by the World Bank According to these calculations from UNICEF (2003), it would only take an additional 7 billion US dollars (to the money officially already available) over a period of 10 years to give all children between 6 and 15 years a school education. In brief: moral judgments are based upon rapid and automatic emotional responses to morally relevant stimuli, and moral reasoning is „only‟ a post hoc explanation or justification of these emotional reactions These automatic evaluations are certainly dependent on one‟s representations, the content of the actual subject, and are linked to the current goals related to the issue and the desired outcome; they are based on an egocentric assessment of what is good or bad from one‟s own perspective. “These automatic egocentric evaluations are seen as valid representations of reality, and opposing viewpoints as self-interested distortions,” (Epley & Caruso, 2004, p. 178)
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